Quality of life and emotional distress in advanced prostate cancer survivors undergoing chemotherapy
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Quality of life and emotional distress in advanced prostate cancer survivors undergoing chemotherapy Peter C Trask* Address: Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine. The Miriam Hospital and Brown Medical School, Coro Building, Suite 500, One Hoppin St. Providence, RI 02903, USA Email: Peter C Trask* - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 23 July 2004 Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 2004, 2:37
doi:10.1186/1477-7525-2-37
Received: 02 July 2004 Accepted: 23 July 2004
This article is available from: http://www.hqlo.com/content/2/1/37 © 2004 Trask; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Prostate cancer continues to occur in over 230,000 men each year. Although the majority of these will be diagnosed in the early stages, there remains a proportion who will either be diagnosed in late stage disease or develop progressive disease. In patients with advanced disease, research has recently focused on using chemotherapy for symptom management and palliation. Given that the focus is not on cure, the effect of chemotherapy on quality of life is of utmost importance. The present article will 1) summarize the current chemotherapeutic studies that have included a quality of life component, with a particular focus on pain and fatigue, 2) discuss the issue of distress in advanced prostate cancer patients treated with chemotherapy, and 3) suggest future research directions. From the studies that have investigated quality of life, it appears that several chemotherapeutic agents reduce pain and fatigue, although the development of fatigue is often the dose-limiting factor of some agents. The assessment of overall quality of life has occurred in several studies, however, an examination into the impact of chemotherapy on functional status and interpersonal relationships has not been studied. Finally, in contrast to the numerous studies in early stage prostate cancer patients, the presence and effect of distress in chemotherapy-treated prostate patients has not been examined. As such, increased attention is needed to quality of life during phase I-III chemotherapy trials.
Background and significance Prostate cancer will be diagnosed in an estimated 230,110 men during 2004 [1]. There will also be approximately 29,900 men who will die from prostate cancer this year, making it the second leading cause of cancer death among men. While early detection and improved treatments have resulted in improved 5-year survival rates for individuals with early stage prostate cancer (recent data have put the 5-year survival rates at 100% for men diagnosed with local and regional prostate cancer), there remains a proportion
of men (roughly 14%) who will be diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. For these individuals, the 5-year surv
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